Fifty years ago today I got the three AM call. I don’t remember 100% who was on the other line but it was probably my older sister Mary who was chosen to deliver the message. “You have to come home right now… Daddy’s really sick. Mom said to take a taxi. We will pay for it when you get here.” Those were not words spoken lightly. To take a taxi from my friend Dave’s home on the North Side of Pittsburgh to my home in the suburb of Shaler Township was going to be expensive. Not the kind of money a sixteen-year-old kid carried around in his pocket. The wait for the taxi was long; the 25-minute ride home was even longer. “Daddy’s really sick.” What does that mean? Sure I knew he was not in the best of health. He was extremely overweight and he compounded that by being a heavy drinker… even I knew that. Iron City Beer was his beverage of choice. He had been on disability from his job since a head-on auto accident three years ago. The other driver crossed the centerline and smashed into him and mom as they came home from shopping at the grocery store. My little sisters Susan and Dorothy were in the back seat. The kids were OK, but the accident tore up Dad’s right ankle pretty bad and put mom through the windshield at a time when seat belts were considered a novelty. They both survived, but life had changed. Dad could no longer perform his job as a fitter at the factory…putting large rolling presses together and taking them apart before they were shipped to the steel mill. Mom… she came home after three months in the hospital… they had to wire the bones in her face back together like a jigsaw puzzle. She had a bump on her nose and looked different… like she had aged 20 years. But they survived. Halfway through the taxi ride home, I began to think of the “worst-case scenario” in my mind, something I tend to do to this day. “Daddy’s really sick”…. “What happens if he dies?” That would leave mom and us seven kids ages 17 to 6 all on our own. I got my answer ten minutes later as I pulled up to our house and saw a police car with red lights flashing, and an ambulance parked in the driveway… along with a few other cars I had never seen. Holy shit what the hell is going on? As someone came out to give the taxi driver money, my sister Jane rushed up to the cab and shouted: “Daddy’s dead… Daddy’s dead!”
That was 50 years ago today. October 25th, 1969… half a century ago. My mother and all seven kids made it through that crazy night and the years that followed… but dad did not. He passed away that night at the age of 47. Mom, on the other hand, doubled his lifetime… she lived to age 94.
Dad sure missed a lot. He missed seeing all seven of his kids grow up and create 
interesting lives and have kids of their own. He never knew I became a professional magician. He never saw me perform on his favorite TV Show Johnny Carson, one that we often watched together. He missed meeting his grandkids and his great, grandchildren.
In my show Miracles & Other Deceptions at the Omni Parker House in Boston, I close each show with a performance of my trick The Cups & Steel Balls… it’s a tribute to the memory of my steel town dad. I started practicing this trick in the summer of 1969, so it’s one of the very few tricks my dad would have seen me perform. He probably saw one of my very first attempts. I’ve been performing the trick for over 50 years… I sure wish he could see it now.
